If an app is free, it means the customer is paying with his or her data. But it's estimated that only 2% of the data out there is actionable and insightful. Mining and creating value from data are now paramount to business models. Everything can be measured, but what are the most important things to measure? Let's find out.

PayPerPost, a marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers and other consumer content creators, has announced it has completed a $7 million second round investment led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an investor in the company’s Series A.

YUDU Media has launched YUDU Publishing PRO and YUDU Publishing EXPRESS, which are designed to meet the needs of publishers and content owners of all sizes, allowing them to create a digital edition of a magazine, newspaper, brochure, or catalogue.

Adobe Systems Incorporated has introduced Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES), an integrated family of software for automating processes designed to help businesses and governments more effectively engage with customers, citizens, partners, and suppliers.

MadCap Software, a multi-channel content authoring, and across Systems, a spin-off of Nero AG, have announced a partnership to combine technical content creation with advanced translation and localization.

Genwi has launched its site that aggregates user-contributed RSS feeds in all media formats as well as offer personalized content pages, friend-based media sharing, tagging, popularity rankings, and other tools for navigating and filtering online media.

Tizra Inc. has closed on an investment made by the Slater Technology Fund, a venture development fund based in Rhode Island, in the amount of $500,000 to finish development and to commercialize the technology for its online publishing and delivery solutions.

FinerEdge Software has announced the immediate availability of FinerEdge Publisher, an enterprise dynamic content publishing solution that can be deployed and integrated with existing enterprise systems and databases.

Involving the users, and integrating their content, requires deeper engagement and the right tools. Building and improving social networks to meet the needs of diverse communities is no small task. Fortunately, the maturing of technology and business models has spawned a new generation of enablers to help get users to join in.

As digitized content disperses, publishing brands and content wares splinter across countless platforms, devices, feeds, and syndication venues; the business and editorial infrastructure beneath it all, is fragmenting and reassembling just as quickly. The business models, like the content, are flying everywhere and the trick is to keep the overall vision on target, not just cope with content shrapnel.

Online media rooms provide many lessons in leveraging the value of econtent. This is the one place on any type of organization’s site where marketers and communicators act like publishers to create valuable and original content that reaches all of their constituents.

Examples of fixed and fluid organizations abound. There are those that rely on size and dominance to maintain the status quo and those which, even if they are large, stay nimble and evolve with the marketplace, in part by tapping the collective web whims and wisdom.

The Laser Institute of America has announced that beginning with the February 2007 issue, the Journal of Laser Applications (JLA) will post each accepted paper online as soon as it is copy edited, composed, and approved for publication.

MadCap Software has released MadCap Echo. MadCap Echo is an application that provides a way for authors to create and incorporate audio and customizable Flash files into online output, and it works with file formats such as XML, SWF, MP3, and WAV.